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While musicians contribute a great deal to the atmosphere of a city like Austin, Texas, they may be poorly compensated for their work. Their low salaries, personality traits, and lifestyle preferences may also mean that musicians may be reluctant to engage in preventative health strategies. Frequently lacking sufficient health insurance, musicians may have difficulty coping with health challenges such as depression and anxiety, hearing loss, poor nutrition, and alcohol and substance abuse.

This chapter opens with background on the music scene in Austin, Texas and moves to a description of a recent study on how musicians feel their careers impact their health. This is followed by a literature review that summarizes what is known about musicians’ personalities, their lifestyles, the economic factors they face, and their health disparities. In the last half of the chapter, the author summarizes how libraries currently serve musicians and add recommendations for how libraries might expand these services.

This study aims to investigate the motivations behind visiting music performers’ attendance at a music festival in the context of a rural Japanese island and how these motivations are connected to community revitalization within the framework of social exchange theory.

Participant observation and 20 in-depth semi structured interviews were conducted with the visiting musicians at the Kurahashi East-West Music Festival on Kurahashi-jima in Hiroshima Prefecture. A qualitative analysis approach using thematic coding, grounded in social exchange theory, was employed to examine the perspectives of the participants.

The findings identified seven key themes related to motivation: performing and interacting with fellow musicians, for leisure performing or “fun”, providing a cultural experience to the community, participating for tourism purposes, because of sense of belonging to the destination, to collaborate with a prominent musician, and loyalty and commitment to a performance group. The results demonstrated that leisure performance and musician interaction were the most dominant themes in terms of motivation, while the importance of the other themes varied.

By employing social exchange theory at a micro-level, this study delved deeper into the motivations perceived by visiting performing musicians at music festivals and their implications for community revitalization. The insights gained from this research provide valuable implications for festival organizers, performers and community leaders to tailor music festivals for community revitalization.

In this paper, the authors study artistic improvising from a routine dynamics perspective, with a specific interest in how the performance of improvising is strategically enacted. While this dynamic is difficult to empirically study in the case of live improvisation on stage, as we know it from jazz, the specific situation of the recording studio allows the authors to investigate the research puzzle in great detail. First, the authors show how the performance of one specific routine, which the authors identify as the looping routine, makes systematic improvising possible. The authors describe how looping enables improvising through mobilizing the digital equipment in the recording studio. The authors further discuss how the performance of the looping routine allows for individual musical performances in improvising, as well as their emergence into and assembling of a coherent song and record. During the looping routine, the authors find not only artistic improvising but also strategic enactment. Therefore, the authors show how performing the looping routine in the studio enables the strategic enactment of the emerging musical patterns by the musicians and the producer. Thereby, the artistic ideas and performances of the musicians and producers involved are competitively valued and strategically positioned in view of industry-specific contexts.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the connection between musicians’ information seeking behaviour and the creative process in music, providing a framework for understanding the role of information needs satisfaction in musical creativity. A number of studies in information science literature have been carried out attempting to model cognitive, affective, behavioural and contextual factors associated with music information seeking behaviour. However, only few studies have addressed the relationship between information seeking behaviour and musical creative activities such as composition, performance and improvisation, listening and analysis.

The focus of this paper is to provide a framework for the study of information seeking behaviour for the purposes of satisfying musical creativity information needs, combining the theoretical basis of an established model of information behaviour developed by Wilson and the theoretical perspectives of a music creative thinking model proposed by Webster. The key features of the two models are synthesized in a unified model of information seeking behaviour for musical creativity and enriched with research findings identified in the literature of both musical information seeking and musical creativity.

The proposed conceptual framework offers an integrated interpretation of the combinations of information needs, information resources and environmental/personal barriers, which enable musical creativity. In the authors’ approach “musical creativity” is treated as a musician’s aim or ambition or drive for expression and is influenced by the way musicians seek information for that purpose. Therefore, musical creativity is an intentional behaviour which acts as motivator for information seeking and is affected by the available information and the musician’s information seeking profile. The current study include three important findings: first, the design and development of music library and information services for musical creativity; second, the development of music information literacy skills for creativity; and third, the information seeking behavioural perspective for universal musical creativity, and the implications for cultural musical heritage diffusion around the world.

An integrated information seeking behaviour model which includes musical creativity is developed through the synthesis of two already existing approaches, that of Wilson for information seeking behaviour and that of Webster for creative thinking in music. The present conceptual study presents a three stage pattern or process for modelling information seeking for musical creativity: the process initiates with the intention-motivation for creativity, then proceeds to information seeking behaviour and then concludes with the musical creativity outcomes. This is the first study that seeks to understand the relationships between creativity and information seeking behaviour.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how people making music represent their production activities using images of consumption.

Supporting evidence is based on in-depth interviews with musicians and support personnel. The data are structured through a thematic analysis.

The paper argues that consumption serves as a discursive resource that allows cultural producers to make sense of production activities which do not conform to an image of production as an alienated form of labour.

Relating the analysis to the ongoing attempts to conceptualise cultural producers through the concept of prosumption, the paper concludes that there are limits to cultural producers’ abilities to represent their production activities as production rather than a structural change in social or economic organisation, as suggested by some consumer researchers.

A proposition offered in this manuscript is that activist musicians use their musical competencies to enhance their social change strategies within the local community. However, it is unclear what strategies are being utilized by local activist musicians in order to reach collective action and achieve social and political change. A self-developed framework, the Framework for Activist Musicians (FAM), portrays how an activist musician utilizes their social experiences, behaviors, and influence to enact social change. The framework delineates how a musician utilizes their music-making involvement and status to enhance their charisma and authenticity as an activist to establish social change. Additionally, the framework outlines the unique qualities of a musician and activist which make them well-prepared to be an influential community leader.

Blues music is in the midst of its second revival in popularity in roughly thirty years. The year 1960 can be identified, with some qualification, as a reference point for the first rise in international awareness and appreciation of the blues. This first period of wide‐spread white interest in the blues continued until the early seventies, while the current revival began in the middle 1980s. During both periods a sizeable literature on the blues has appeared. This article provides a thumbnail sketch of the popularity of the blues, followed by a description of scholarly and critical literature devoted to the music. Documentary and instructional materials in audio and video formats are also discussed. Recommendations are made for library collections and a list of selected sources is included at the end of the article.

The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the picture of situational relevance of music information from a performing musician’s point of view by delving into its diverse layers within the context of Doctor of Music students’ information seeking.

Music-related information is approached through six modes that categorize music information sources based on their levels of abstraction. Situational relevance of the modes of music information is examined in relation to the situational requirements of accomplishing a dissertation on music task consisting of both a series of concerts and a written thesis. The empirical material was collected by interviewing Finnish doctoral students in the field of music performance.

A set of situational relevance types related to each mode of music information were identified. As a whole, the differences between the perceived importance of the modes varied a little.

The goal of the present paper is not to create a generalizable list of situational relevance types suggested by modes of music information, but to show that the modes may suggest diverse situational relevance types of their own when evaluated by performing musicians.

The present paper provides a rare account on performing musicians’ vocational and school-related information seeking. For studies of music information retrieval, the present paper offers new contextual facets explaining why diverse music information could be relevant to musicians. For studies of music-related information seeking, the present study offers new insights on why performing musicians have information needs regarding certain types of music information sources.

This chapter examines the evolving nature of work patterns and income streams for contemporary Musicians in the United Kingdom. It explores the experiences of independent, portfolio career Musicians working in the Rock/Pop/Indie/Jazz Live Music scene. The Music industry is reported to contribute £5.2bn in Gross Value Added (GVA) to the economy, of which according to UK Music (2019) £2.5bn is generated by ‘Creative Sector’ workers, which includes performing Musicians. Despite these high revenues, UK Music (2019) consistently reports that many Musicians earn below the average working wage of other professions. Challenges to Musicians' work and income streams have been compounded by changes in consumption of Music due to digitization, a lack of systematic support from government for grassroots venues and unequal revenue distribution. In this context, we reveal findings from research interviews with Musicians, which were conducted just before and during the peak of the Covid-19 pandemic (mainly in the North of England and Wales). Our research discovers how these Musicians utilize informal community mechanisms to navigate poor working conditions, value ‘dignity’ and ‘meaningfulness’ above remuneration and often default to individualist assumptions regarding career success.